The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO today — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.

All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.

A shooting at a Chicago hospital has wounded multiple people, including a suspect and a police officer, authorities said.

Shots were fired Monday afternoon at Mercy Hospital on the city’s South Side, and officers were searching the facility. Police issued a statement on Twitter saying there were “reports of multiple victims.”

A witness named James Gray told Chicago television station ABC 7 that he saw multiple people shot: “It looked like he was turning and shooting people at random.”

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI

JUST IN: Sens. Blumenthal, Whitehouse and Hirono file lawsuit challenging President Trump’s appointment of Acting AG Whitaker, arguing the appointment is unconstitutional because Whitaker was not in Senate-confirmed post.

New: “The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce that Ron Chernow, one of the most eminent biographers of American presidents and statesmen, will be the featured speaker at its annual dinner on Saturday, April 27, 2019.” History and First Amendment theme.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

The traditional news media amplify his words for a variety of reasons, including newsworthiness (he is, after all, the president), easy ratings (cable-news audiences have soared in his term), and old-fashioned peer pressure (the segment producer’s lament: “If everybody else is carrying Trump, shouldn’t we?”).

But a virus doesn’t just borrow a host’s cellular factory to reproduce; it often destroys the host in the process. The traditional news media are thoroughly infected by the Trump virus. It is not only spreading the disease of the president’s lies, but also suffering from a demise in public trust—at least among one half of the electorate.

Entrusted as the landlord to 400,000 people, the Housing Authority has struggled for years to fulfill its mission amid a strangled budget and almost endemic political neglect. Last week, a judge suggested strongly that the federal government should take over the agency after an investigation found evidence of deep mismanagement, including that the Housing Authority failed to perform lead inspections and then falsely claimed it had. Six top executives lost their jobs amid the federal investigation; a complaint was filed in June.

But the authority did not just ignore the required lead inspections, The New York Times found.

For at least two decades, almost every time a child in its apartments tested positive for high lead levels, Nycha launched a counteroffensive, city records show. From 2010 through July of this year, the agency challenged 95 percent of the orders it received from the Health Department to remove lead detected in Nycha apartments.

The list is a culmination of all the people who were reported missing — and remain unaccounted for — since the devastating Camp fire erupted in Butte County in the early hours of Nov. 8, consuming entire neighborhoods in just hours. That number dropped Sunday for the first time in days, from 1,202 to 993. But it raises a startling question: Could that many people really have died in the blaze?

Authorities say probably not.

The data are far from perfect. Some people may be listed twice, or more. Others may be safe somewhere, unaware that someone is looking for them.

“This is a dynamic list,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told reporters. “It will fluctuate both up and down, every day.”

Nissan Motor Co. will remove Carlos Ghosn as chairman after he was arrested in Tokyo for violations of financial law, throwing the auto industry’s largest global alliance into turmoil.

Ghosn, a towering figure who saved Nissan from collapse and brought it together with Renault SA and Mitsubishi Motors Corp., was detained Monday in Tokyo over a suspected breach of Japanese financial laws, Nissan Chief Executive Officer Hiroto Saikawa told reporters in Yokohama, Japan. Ghosn and Director Greg Kelly have been under investigation at Nissan for several months, and the board is set to meet Thursday to remove them both.

America’s farmers have been shut out of foreign markets, hit with retaliatory tariffs and lost lucrative contracts in the face of President Trump’s trade war. But a $12 billion bailout program Mr. Trump created to “make it up” to farmers has done little to cushion the blow, with red tape and long waiting periods resulting in few payouts so far.

According to the Department of Agriculture, just $838 million has been paid out to farmers since the first $6 billion pot of money was made available in September. Another pool of up to $6 billion is expected to become available next month. The government is unlikely to offer additional money beyond the $12 billion, according to Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary.

Up to 400 people fanned out Sunday to search the ash and rubble where homes once stood before flames roared through the Sierra foothills town of Paradise and surrounding communities, killing at least 77 people in the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century.

Wearing white coveralls, hard hats and masks, teams of volunteers and search and rescue crews poked through the smoky debris for fragments of bone before rains can wash them away or turn loose, dry ash into a thick paste. The so-called Camp Fire has destroyed more than 10,500 homes.

A team of 10 volunteers, accompanied by a cadaver dog, went from house to house in the charred landscape. They scrutinized the rubble in five-minute sweeps, using sticks to move aside debris and focused on vehicles, bathtubs and what was left of mattresses.

When no remains were found, they spray-painted a large, orange “0″ near the house and moved on.

“Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that, wouldn’t it have been nice?” the president said [on Fox News Sunday]. “You know, living — think of this — living in Pakistan, beautifully in Pakistan, in what I guess they considered a nice mansion, I don’t know, I’ve seen nicer. But living in Pakistan right next to the military academy, everybody in Pakistan knew he was there.”

Reid started building the state party for the 2004 election, when Nevada was in a tug of war between its Western libertarian roots and the Democratic leanings of recent transplants. The party had no permanent staff in nonelection years; now it has double digits.

Senate Republicans had sent him a warning shot that November by ousting his predecessor as Democratic leader, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota. That led Reid to step up efforts to protect his home flank. He helped make Nevada’s caucuses one of the first-in-the-nation presidential contests and a destination for political spending by national aspirants.

“It didn’t really matter that his name wasn’t on the ballot, he was all in every day,” said Rebecca Lambe, a longtime Reid aide and Democratic strategist.

Reid used the national cash flowing in to build a strong state Democratic Party and bolster a network of pro-immigrant and environmental organizations. They worked with Las Vegas’ potent unions to power a Democratic turnout machine.

“This is what Democrats need to be doing everywhere. This is the long game,” said Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist and former Reid staffer.

Kevin McKay drove the school bus along gridlocked, dark roads as pockets of fire burned all around. Nearly two dozen elementary school children were on board with him.

Smoke began to fill the bus, so McKay took off a shirt. He and two teachers on the bus tore it into pieces and doused them with water. The children held the damp pieces of cloth to their mouths and breathed through them.

He had only been on the job, driving the bus for Ponderosa Elementary School in the northern California city of Paradise, for a few months. Now, McKay was ferrying the 22 stranded children to safety as the Camp Fire scorched everything in its path. It would take five harrowing hours for them to reach safety.

After CNN won a temporary restraining order on Friday, forcing the White House to restore his press pass for 14 days, White House officials sent Acosta a letter stating that his pass is set to be suspended again once the restraining order expires.

From the looks of the letter, the W.H. is trying to establish a paper trail that will empower the administration to boot Acosta again at the end of the month.

CNN responded with this statement on Sunday: “The White House is continuing to violate the First and 5th Amendments of the Constitution. These actions threaten all journalists and news organizations. Jim Acosta and CNN will continue to report the news about the White House and the President.”

A group of anti-immigrant protestors in Tijuana gathered outside a shelter housing Central American migrants on Sunday and demanded that the “invasores” leave Mexico

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

11/18/2018

Stacey Abrams isn’t done yet

I’m going to spend the next year as a private citizen, but I do indeed intend to run for office again. I’m not sure for what, and I am not exactly certain when. I need to take a nap. But once I do, I’m planning to get back into the ring.

For at least two decades, almost every time a child in its apartments tested positive for high lead levels, [the New York City Housing Authority] launched a counteroffensive, city records show. From 2010 through July of this year, the agency challenged 95 percent of the orders it received from the Health Department to remove lead detected in Nycha apartments.

Private landlords almost never contest a finding of lead; they did so in only 4 percent of the 5,000 orders they received over the same period, records show.

Nycha’s strategy often worked. The Health Department backed down in 158 of 211 cases in public housing after the authority challenged its finding, the data shows.

I love the Browns – and I know they will hire an experienced coach to take us to the next level.

On a more serious note, I do hope that the NFL will start to bring women into the coaching profession as position coaches and eventually coordinators and head coaches. One doesn’t have to play the game to understand it and motivate players. But experience counts – and it is time to develop a pool of experienced women coaches.

I’m not ready to coach but I would like to call a play or two next season if the Browns need ideas!

Mark Zuckerberg gathered roughly 50 of his top lieutenants earlier this year and told them that Facebook Inc. was at war and he planned to lead the company accordingly.

During times of peace, executives can move more slowly and ensure that everybody is on board with key decisions, he said during the June meeting, according to people familiar with the remarks. But with Facebook under siege from lawmakers, investors and angry users, he needed to act more decisively, the people said.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s new approach is causing unprecedented turmoil atop Facebook, driving several key executives from the company, according to people familiar with the matter. At times, it has created tensions with his longtime chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The June meeting and strains with Ms. Sandberg haven’t been previously reported. …

Mr. Zuckerberg, who previously set annual goals such as to learn Mandarin and read 25 books, said this year he would focus on fixing Facebook. He believes this tougher management style is necessary to tackle challenges being raised both internally and externally, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

Photo: Evacuees rest in their tents for the night in the "Wallywood" encampment in a Walmart parking lot in Chico, California on Saturday. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

11/18/2018

Who will be able to afford the new normal of unsafe California air?

I already knew, in an abstract, intellectual way, that class and race can and will determine who really incurs the costs of climate change, but living through these fires for the past couple of years has really made it tangible.

I live in an old and drafty house, but I also have enough money to afford to make an unplanned purchase of an expensive air purifier to mitigate the effects of the wildfire smoke on us — especially on the baby. And when shipping got delayed, I not only knew where to look to figure out how to make a makeshift purifier, I could still afford to do so. And I had the time to figure out how to make it work when the hardware store didn’t have the right stuff in stock.

We all got sick anyway, but I have peace of mind knowing that 1) I can afford to go to the doctor and buy medicine if necessary, and 2) I can take day off if I need it or I need it to take care of the kid.

On a day where the air was especially bad, I could afford to have food delivered to my house to avoid going to the grocery store or using my gas stove and making the air in the house worse — the person delivering my food didn’t have the option of avoiding the smoke.

And if it gets really bad, we have the job flexibility and money to be able to drive elsewhere to escape, as we did last year. It’s not ideal and a hit to the budget, but it’s possible if necessary. Lots of people do not have that option.

Honestly? I’m thinking that next year, the smart thing to do might be to not plan a vacation and instead use that money as the “escaping the smoke from seasonal wildfires” fund. Just have that be the vacation instead.

But students who don’t go to Johns Hopkins will still need the government’s help

Good for Bloomberg, but its wearying that our solution to increasing access and dealing with student debt is having an insanely rich alum, a solution that is not easily at hand for the institutions where most of our students gohttps://t.co/8RjoRBOxz5

Former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced Sunday he is giving a record $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University to support student financial aid at his alma mater and make its admissions process “forever need-blind.”

The gift, believed to be the largest private donation in modern times to higher education, is a landmark in a growing national movement to make elite universities more accessible to students from low-to-middle income families.

It will enable the private research university in Baltimore to eliminate loans from financial aid packages for incoming students starting next fall, expand grants for those in financial need and even provide relief to many current undergraduates who had previously taken out federal loans to pay their bills.

“Paradise will come back, but it can’t be what it once was. It shouldn’t be.”

People prepared. Fire prevention officials planned. They drilled. They worked with homeowners. They invented fire-safe councils and Fire on the Ridge and sent fire prevention officials to schools via a program called Fire Pals. They raised money to keep fire lookouts open when the state said it wouldn’t.

Eventually, geography and topography proved to be the trap everyone thought it was.

Paradise and Magalia sit on top of a pine-studded ridge between several canyons. There are very few subdivisions. Instead, homes are built one at a time and tucked into trees. Fly over the area in a helicopter and those trees stand like matchsticks surrounding well-hidden homes.

It wasn’t a well-planned city, but rather a village that grew into a city. The grid pattern of Paradise’s roads is haphazard. There are few arterials. Instead, there are two-lane roads without much connectivity. When people tried to evacuate in a flash, those bottlenecks were pronounced. Several people died in their cars, trapped by gridlock.

The large roads leading out of town aren’t large. Only Skyway is two lanes in both directions. Two summers ago, the town decided to turn Skyway from four lanes to two in the downtown area to “calm” traffic and make things more quaint. That couldn’t have helped the escape.

Even when they can find what’s left of the Camp fire victims, some remains may never be identified

“We’re finding remains in various states,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. “I suspect there are some that will have been completely consumed.”

Search-and-rescue teams can take hours collecting a single victim – trying to make sure bones or other body parts aren’t left behind for relatives and friends to find when they return.

Still, “there is certainly the unfortunate possibility that even after we’ve searched an area, once people get back in there, it’s possible that human remains could be found,” Honea said. “I know that’s a very difficult thing to think about, but that’s the difficult situation we find ourselves in today.” …

The sheer heat generated by California’s deadliest wildfire will complicate matters. At its peak, the inferno may have reached temperatures exceeding 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. It could be impossible in some cases to obtain DNA samples from the victims, thwarting what is often the ID method employed when all else fails. “The severity, the blaze, the burning – who knows what DNA is left?” said Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder of an Orange County consulting company called Identifinders International. “You need a certain amount of DNA.”

From the LA Times’ must-read, absolutely terrifying hour-by-hour narrative of the Camp fire

The fire caught up to [34-year-old Nichole] Jolly on Pearson Road, blasting her car with heat. She reached for the stethoscope slung around her neck and flinched as the metal burned. Her steering wheel was melting — the plastic stuck to her hands.

As her car caught fire and began to fill with black smoke, she called her husband. “Run,” he told her.

Jolly fled for safety to the car ahead of hers, but it too was abandoned. She ran on.

The rubber on her shoes melted into the asphalt. The back of her scrubs caught fire, blistering her legs. She tried another car, but it wasn’t moving.

“I can’t die like this,” she told herself. “There’s no way I’m going to die sitting in a car. I have to run.”

Jolly plunged into the smoke, now blinding, and ran with her hands stretched out in front of her. She hit firm, hot metal. A firetruck.

Two firefighters lifted her in and radioed for help, pleading for a water drop. The crackled response came back: “Impossible.”

Meanwhile in the only remaining Senate race, a small opening for the Democrats

Last year, in another runoff special Senate election in Alabama, a surge of African-American turnout led to a stunning victory for Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore, who had been accused of sexually molesting and assaulting teenage girls. The allegations gave voters in the state who don’t typically support Democrats something to vote against.

[Mike] Espy, a 64-year-old former congressman and agriculture secretary, now hopes [Republican Cindy] Hyde-Smith’s comments [about attending a public hanging and suppressing liberal voters] will similarly turbocharge turnout and tilt voters in the November 27 runoff against her. …

Still, to win the Senate runoff, Espy must walk a tightrope, overperforming among African-American voters and college students in the state’s urban areas in a runoff being held on the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving weekend while also winning a share of voters who typically back Republicans. It’s difficult to do both.

Bill Nelson in his concession: “We must end all forms of voter suppression, make it easier for Americans to vote, and honor the ideal that we are governed by the majority and not by the minority rule.” pic.twitter.com/lxhwg7W7du

One likely reason so many people are still unaccounted for in the Northern California fire zone (but may not actually be “missing”)

[On Butte County’s “raw” list of the unaccounted for], many of the people whose ages are listed are elderly - reflecting the area’s popularity as a retirement hotspot. Paradise, the town in Butte County that was devastated by the wildfire, has an estimated population of about 27,000. According to the latest census, about a quarter of those are aged 65 or over.

Eric Reinbold, the chief of police in Paradise, said the list’s demographics underscore the difficulties in evacuating older residents in rapid emergency situations.

“Like any community, we had elderly folks and some of them gave up driving or can’t drive,” Chief Reinbold said.

If they did make it out, older residents may also be less likely to have access to the internet or other mobile communications to contact people they know.

Trump told reporters Saturday while visiting the ruins of the Northern California town where a fire killed at least 76 people that wildfires weren’t a problem in Finland because crews “spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things” to clear forest floors.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said in an interview published Sunday in the Ilta-Sanomat newspaper that he spoke briefly with Trump about forest management on Nov. 11, when they both were in Paris for Armistice Day events.

Niinisto said their conversation focused on the California wildfires and the surveillance system Finland uses to monitor forests for fires. He remembered telling Trump “We take care of our forests,” but couldn’t recall raking coming up.

Seems likely Democrats will eventually get up to about 60 million total votes for the House once unprocessed ballots from California are tallied. Maybe a bit more (~61M?) based on what’s left in other states. Those are similar numbers to what recent GOP presidential candidates have received.

Trump got 63M votes, Romney 61M, McCain 60M. Democratic votes for the House this year should be very close to that range. There’s not any precedent for an opposition party coming this close to matching the president’s vote total from 2 years earlier. The closest to an exception was when Democratic House candidates in 1970 got 92% of Nixon’s vote total from 1968.

Of course, this reflects three things we already knew:

1) Trump was elected despite losing the popular vote;

2) Democrats’s won by a big margin this year and

3) Turnout was VERY high.

But Trump is a very unpopular president, and I don’t think that’s totally sunk in yet in how he’s covered.

About 60 million people turned out to vote for Democrats for the House this year. That is a **crazy** number. (Republicans got 45M votes in the 2010 wave.) And this was sort of missed. Why so many stories about Trump voters in truck stops and not so many about “the resistance”?

The manual recount actually shifted the margin by 2,570 votes, which is more than twice as many as the previous record recount shift this century. The fact that Florida is a huge state helps, but that’s certainly notable.

A principal concern that I have about this is that the Browns, whom Condoleezza Rice and I both love, will use her to satisfy the Rooney Rule and will fail to consider any other black candidates for the head coaching job.

John Dorsey, the Browns general manager, did say that he’d consider a woman for the job. Leaking that Rice would be the first such candidate underscores what a joke that was. This is throwing table scraps at feminist goals, using that promise for P.R. value rather than progress.

Rice, like me, is a Browns fan. Has been since her days growing up in Alabama. Our differing politics aside, she could possibly bring something to the organization in another capacity. But there are women now coaching football who could use this interviewing experience.

The Browns have a promising rookie quarterback, at last, as well as other young stars who need the best coaching that you can find. Dorsey does not appear to be focused fully on that mission. Considering Condi Rice is something Trump would do if he were running the Browns.

“Sitting back in the 1960s, I would never have believed this would happen,” said Stuart K. Spencer, a party strategist who spent more than half a century ushering Republicans, including President Reagan, into office.

But noting the extensive demographic and political changes that have taken place [in California] — especially over the last two decades — “it’s pretty understandable,” Spencer said. …

It’s the Republican wipeout in Orange County, a wellspring of conservatism that nourished generations of state and national party leaders, that stands as a shock. Many never thought they would see a day when its expansive suburban tracts were anything but flaming Republican red.

“A huge deal,” said Eileen Padberg, a veteran GOP strategist who recently shed her affiliation out of frustration with Trump and the national party.

Likening the GOP’s hegemony to a dictatorship, Padberg said that for as long as she could recall, “If you wanted contracts, if you wanted a job, you had to be a Republican.”

But, she said, as Orange County changed — growing younger, more diverse, more socially tolerant — most of its Republican lawmakers failed to change with it. “They focused only on their right-wing base,” Padberg said, “and didn’t do a good job problem-solving.”

Zuck says Facebook will fire employees who leak to the Times in a private company meeting leaked to the Times

In an hourlong videoconference broadcast to Facebook offices around the world, Mr. Zuckerberg responded to questions from employees on a range of topics, from Facebook’s behavior over the past 18 months to how it should handle leaks to the media, according to three people familiar with the discussion but not willing to discuss it publicly because it was a private meeting.

The idea that Facebook tried to “cover up anything” was dead wrong, an impassioned Mr. Zuckerberg said, using an expletive in his response, according to these people. Some employees responded with muted applause and cheers. …

Some Facebook employees indicated that they believe The Times and other news outlets are unfairly targeting the company because of its outsize influence — a sentiment shared in the session on Friday when employees asked executives what would happen to employees who leak information to the press.

Mr. Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook would not hesitate to fire employees who spoke to The New York Times or other publications. But after an employee asked whether the company should issue a report about how many leakers Facebook had found and fired, Mr. Zuckerberg played down the idea.

Going into 2016, the GOP had carried Orange County in every presidential race since 1936 and held four House districts there. Then Clinton won it by 8% and Dems [have now won] every House district that includes Orange County.

On other hand, Orange County voters still open to GOP down-ballot, though barely: GOP still ahead in the two state Senate seats it was defending in Orange (though its margin in #SD34 is melting), and Don Barnes won an important sheriff’s election with immigration and ethics in backdrop.

My usual point: given big scandals in sheriff’s office, allegations of abusive detention, and *huge* immigration stakes, fact that Barnes appears to have done better than (all?) other Republicans running countywide signals work still to be done to make these issues and races salient.

The California GOP’s collapse in Orange County wasn’t limited to House races. Right now Gavin Newsom is losing the county by 1.2 points, and may end up winning it. Jerry Brown lost it by 11 points. https://t.co/YlrxaMjB1S

Chalk up another House seat — and a complete sweep — for the Dems in Reagan Country (the midterm wave now stands at +37)

Breaking: Gil Cisneros has defeated Republican Young Kim in the 39th Congressional District. His victory means the longtime conservative stronghold of Orange County will be represented entirely by Democrats in the House next session. https://t.co/VJVI3YXMLq

Trump refused to listen to Khashoggi’s murder, and still doesn’t (want to) know about MBS’s involvement

Trump also suggested he may just live with it, even if Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman misled him, because “we do have an ally and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.”

“I don’t know,” he told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “Who could really know? But I can say this, he’s got many people now that say he had no knowledge.”

Trump said he had refused to listen to a tape of the killing shared by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“Because it’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape,” he said. “I’ve been fully briefed on it. There’s no reason for me to hear it. … It was very violent, very vicious and terrible.”

Now nearly 1,300 people are unaccounted for in Camp fire (and the death toll has risen to 76)

Even as hundreds of searchers sift through the rubble in the town of Paradise[, California] looking for the dead, nearly 1,300 people remain unaccounted for more than a week after the fire sparked in Butte County, Sheriff Kory Honea announced Saturday night. Authorities stressed that the long roster does not mean they believe all those people are missing.

Honea pleaded with fire evacuees Saturday to review the list of those reported as unreachable by family and friends and call if they are safe. Deputies have located hundreds of people to date, but the overall number keeps growing because they are adding more names, including those from the disaster’s chaotic early hours, Honea said. …

Rain was forecast for midweek, which could help firefighters but also complicate the search for remains. The National Weather Service warned that on Sunday, the area could get 20 mph sustained winds and 40 mph gusts, which could make it hard for crews to continue making progress against the blaze.

Photo: Jason House attempts to put a respirator mask on his dog Rowland at the "Wallywood" evacuee encampment in a Walmart parking lot in Chico, California on Saturday. More than 1,000 people remain listed as missing in the worst-ever wildfire to hit the US state. (Josh Edelson/ AFP/Getty Images)

11/17/2018

Stacey Abrams’s plan to fight for Georgia’s democracy in court

Abrams said the [new federal] lawsuit, which will fall under the umbrella of a new organization called Fair Fight Georgia, will look toward improving the state’s election system prior to municipal elections in 2019 and the 2020 presidential election. Fair Fight may also push for legislative changes at the Capitol, and Abrams said it will hold the state accountable for running elections fairly.

“We have to consider all the pieces that go into voter suppression and diminishing the ability of voters to cast their ballots,” she said. “And that means looking at the staffing and sourcing of polling stations, making sure that there are an adequate number of machines, making certain that poll workers who are often volunteers aren’t judging whether or not someone gets to vote based on how many pieces of paper they have left.”

As for whether she will challenge U.S. Sen. David Perdue in 2020 or seek another bid for governor in four years, Abrams is mum. But she is confident her legal challenges will help continue to expand Georgia’s electorate.

“We know that over the next two years there will be new people who will find themselves energized by politics,” she said. “And I think what we can do in 2020 is absolutely complete the transformation that started this year. It won’t only be at the top of the ticket, but also down the ticket.”

The possibility that both Brexit and the Trump campaign simultaneously relied upon the same social-media company and its transgressive tactics, as well as some of the same advisers, to further far-right nationalist campaigns, set off alarm bells on both sides of the Atlantic. Damian Collins, a member of Parliament, and chair of its Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which held an inquiry into fake news, told the Observer, which has broken much of the news about Cambridge Analytica in the U.K., that the new e-mails “suggest that the role of Bannon and Mercer is far deeper and more complex than we realised. There’s a big question about whether Mercer’s money was used in the Brexit campaign and it absolutely underscores why Britain needs a proper Mueller-style investigation. There are direct links between the political movements behind Brexit and Trump. We’ve got to recognise the bigger picture here. This is being coordinated across national borders by very wealthy people in a way we haven’t seen before.”

The American investigations into foreign interference in Trump’s election, and British probes into Brexit, have increasingly become interwoven. The role of the Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, has reportedly been the subject of interest both to Mueller’s investigators and to those in the U.K., who have examined his relationship to Banks. The role of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the far-right, Euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party, who has been an ally of Bannon and Trump, has also reportedly stirred the interest of investigators in both countries, especially after he was spotted in 2017 leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, in which Julian Assange has taken refuge. Assange’s media platform, WikiLeaks, published many of the e-mails stolen by Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election season.

How and whether all of these pieces fit together is the subject of Mueller’s investigation, but the lack of a similar single, overarching investigation in the U.K. has led critics to call for one.

Reminder: Forest floor raking or not, last summer was really bad for wildfires in Europe

Throughout the Northern Hemisphere this summer, heat waves have been shattering records and sustaining wildfires of unprecedented fury. In Greece [on July 24th], ninety-one people died in a hellish fire—Europe’s deadliest since 1900—that broke out eighteen miles east of Athens and, powered by unusually dry vegetation and strong winds, blazed across a resort town on the Aegean Sea. On July 17th, in Sodankylä, Finland, more than fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle, the thermometer read a previously unseen ninety degrees; in Sweden, wildfires swept across Lapland; in Norway, there have been three times more wildfires this summer than normal. In much of Germany, drought conditions have persisted since May, the Rhine [was] dangerously low, and authorities in the city of Potsdam, outside Berlin, were afraid [in late July] that a wildfire burning around the nearby small town of Fichtenwalde would set off Second World War–era ammunition that remains buried in the area’s forest and meadows.

“I grew up in Finland. a) it rains all year round. b) we have a lengthy and cold winter. c) Finland is a sparsely populated country with just over 5mil ppl, with land size ~3/4 of CA and most of it forests and lakes. d) no friggin body is raking the forests.”

“We have had pretty much the warmest year ever. It has been +5-7C here in the east this week. The summer was one of the driest and hottest ever and that’s why we had quite many fires. On an average year fires are a non-issue. I didn’t complain about the heat myself (I love warm weather). It’s just that it tells you how climate change is changes our climate and that is certainly not good.”

The official, Kirsten Fontenrose, had pushed for tough measures against the Saudi government, and had been in Riyadh to discuss a raft of sanctions that the American government imposed in recent days against those identified as responsible for the killing, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Specifically, she advocated that Saud al-Qahtani, a top adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, be added to the list, and he ultimately was.

The exact circumstances of her departure are murky, and it is unclear whether her advocacy for a hawkish response to the killing angered some in the White House. When she returned to Washington, according to the two people, she had a dispute with her bosses at the National Security Council, where she had served as the director for the Persian Gulf region.

Most research has focused on how smoke exposure affects firefighters or how air pollution, not wildfire smoke specifically, affects people’s health. Many large studies have linked air pollution to heart and lung diseases; one 2012 study found that pregnant women who were exposed to smoke during the 2003 wildfires in Southern California delivered babies with slightly lower birth weight than normal. …

There are similarities between particles found in air pollution from fossil fuels and those found in wildfire smoke. Both contain toxic particles that are invisible to the naked eye that can penetrate into lung tissue and get into the bloodstream. These particles are 2.5 micrometers in size — about one-fortieth the width of a strand of hair. There are also differences, though, that scientists don’t fully understand.

When residential areas burn, they release chemicals into the atmosphere that aren’t emitted when wooded or grassy areas burn. Plastics, household cleaning products, metals from vaporized stoves and washing machines, and synthetic materials from carpets add to poor air conditions. Researchers don’t know what kind of long-term health conditions could be caused or exacerbated by exposure to these compounds.

Stranded in Chico’s “Wallywood” and other places of refuge for Camp fire evacuees

Hundreds of evacuees are squatting at camp in a Walmart parking lot — a ramshackle village some inhabitants call Wallywood, a sardonic mash-up of their location and reduced circumstances. …

“Big picture, we have 6,000, possibly 7,000 households who have been displaced and who realistically don’t stand a chance of finding housing again in Butte County,” county housing official Mayer said. “I don’t even know if these households can be absorbed in California.”

The county has the capacity to place 800 to 1,000 households in permanent housing, Mayer said. Housing was already scarce in Butte County before the Camp Fire. The housing vacancy rate was less than 2 percent, which “is considered a crisis state,” Mayer said. Unlike wealthier Sonoma County, where fires destroyed thousands of homes last year, many residents of Paradise don’t have the financial means to rebuild their homes quickly.

Closing in on the biggest midterm (popular vote) wave in three decades

Assuming [the Democrats’ national lead in House votes] gets up into the ~8.5[%] range, Democrats are also on track to have the largest House popular vote margin by either party in a midterm since 1986, when they it by 9.9 points. D’s did win it by 10.6 points in 2008, but that was a presidential year.

We’re all committed — I’m committed to make sure that we’ve got all of this cleaned out, and protected. Gotta take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forest. It’s very important. You look at other countries where they do it differently, and, it’s a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland, and he said, “We have a, much different — we’re a forest nation.” He called it “a forest nation.” And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem. And when it is, it’s a very small problem. So, uh, I know everybody’s looking at that. To that end. And it’s gonna work out. It’s gonna work out well.

[S]hortly after becoming commander in chief, President Trump asked so few questions in a briefing at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., that top military commanders cut the number of prepared PowerPoint slides to three — they had initially planned 18 — said two officials with knowledge of the visit. The commanders had slotted two hours for the meeting, but it lasted less than one.

Rhetorically, Mr. Trump has embraced the United States’ 1.3 million active-duty troops as “my military” and “my generals” and has posted on Twitter that under his leadership, the American armed forces will be “the finest that our Country has ever had.” But top Defense Department officials say that Mr. Trump has not fully grasped the role of the troops he commands, nor the responsibility that he has to lead them and protect them from politics.

“There was the belief that over time, he would better understand, but I don’t know that that’s the case,” said Col. David Lapan, a retired Marine who served in the Trump administration in 2017 as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t think that he understands the proper use and role of the military and what we can, and can’t, do.”

🚨Here’s the State Department response to reports of CIA’s assessment that MBS ordered killing of Khashoggi: “Recent reports indicating that the US government has made a final conclusion are inaccurate. There remain numerous unanswered questions with respect to the murder” pic.twitter.com/BM1tL6kRQx

“While Facebook surely does exhibit liberal bias in some ways, they have also dramatically — and, in the end, devastatingly — overcorrected for that bias.”

Facebook didn’t tiptoe to avoid poking the bear on the left. They went right up to the bear and stabbed it repeatedly. And then goaded the right’s bear to join in the stabbing.

The power of leftist outrage mobs has been well-discussed. The power of conservative outrage mobs to affect corporate and political policy, even from left-leaning organizations, is arguably less acknowledged.

In no small part to placate the right, the liberal company Facebook misled the nation again and again about the nature of Russian interference in the election. They repeatedly fed right wing conspiracies while waving away criticism from the left. It’s hard to see how an ardently Trumpist company could do much better.

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

“I was watching the firemen the other day, and they were raking areas — they were raking areas. When the fire is right over there and they are raking trees, little trees like this, that are, not trees — little bushes. That you could see are totally dry. Weeds. And they are raking them — they are on fire. That should have been all raked out — you wouldn’t have the fires. …

Maybe [climate change] contributes a little bit. The big problem we have is management. … You need forest management. I’m not saying that in a negative way, a positive — I’m just saying the facts.”

“[California officials and I] will be talking about forest management. I’ve been saying that for a long time. It should have been a lot different situation. But the one thing is that everybody now knows that this is what we have to be doing, and there’s no question about it. It should have been done many years ago. But I think everybody’s on the right side. It’s a big issue, it’s a big issue, a very expensive issue, but very, very inexpensive when you compare it to even one of these horrible fires. And we’ll save a lot of lives.”

“There is truth to statements he has made,” said Daniel Dructor, executive vice president of the American Loggers Council, a coalition of state and regional associations that represents independent contract loggers. “It’s time to rise above political posturing and recognize that active forest management — including logging, thinning, grazing and controlled burning — are tools that can and must be used to reduce fire risks and help mitigate the impacts to landscapes,” Mr. Dructor said in a statement.

One reason that scientists know that management isn’t to blame is that some areas now burning had fires in 2005 and 2008, so they aren’t “fuel-choked closed-canopy forests,” [Utah fire scientist Philip] Dennison said. In those earlier fires, Paradise was threatened but escaped major damage, he said. In the current blazes, it was virtually destroyed.

The other major fire, in Southern California, burned through shrub land, not forest, Dennison said. “It’s not about forest management. These aren’t forests,” he said.

The dean of the University of Michigan’s environmental school, Jonathan Overpeck, said Western fires are getting bigger and more severe. He said it “is much less due to bad management and is instead the result of our baking of our forests, woodlands and grasslands with ever-worsening climate change.”

[T]he fire department’s capacity crunch in the face of devastating and erratic fires has showcased a growing social divide. In areas where some residents felt the need to put their lives on the line, celebrities and affluent homeowners filled the gap with private firefighters to protect their mansions from burning.

In an article published last spring, NBC highlighted that the insurance giant AIG offers wealthy homeowners access to their Wildfire Protection Unit, certified through authorities to respond to fires that threaten million-dollar homes.

TMZ reported this week that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West hired private firefighters to protect their $50m mansion in the hills of Calabasas. It narrowly survived the fire, but critics began wondering if the destruction-fueled “new normal” meant the affluent, yet again, could save themselves while others suffered.

Partisan gerrymandering has been carried out by both Democrats and Republicans throughout U.S. history. But an Associated Press statistical analysis based on 2016 election data found that more states had Republican-tilted districts than Democratic ones. Some of the largest GOP congressional advantages were in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Republicans fully controlled redistricting after the 2010 Census. One of the Democrats’ biggest edges was in Maryland, where they were in charge of the last redistricting.

A follow-up AP analysis using preliminary 2018 election data shows the Republican statistical edge was cut in half under Pennsylvania’s new court-ordered congressional map but grew even larger in North Carolina.

Though an increasing number of states have adopted independent commissions, many states still rely on lawmakers and governors to draw legislative and congressional districts. Republicans controlled that process in far more states than Democrats because of their electoral success nationwide in 2010. Those maps were in place for the Nov. 6 elections, except in places where courts ordered them redrawn, and will be again in 2020.

In one of the most serious cases, Palm Beach County found “dozens of precincts missing a significant number” of votes during the machine recount, according to the supervisor of elections, Susan Bucher, causing the county to conclude that entire boxes of ballots may not have been counted.

Ms. Bucher blamed an overheated and outdated ballot-scanning machine. But the manufacturer of the high-speed scanner used in Palm Beach said its technicians had witnessed Palm Beach County elections workers, apparently worried that one of the machines was running too fast, jam a paper clip into the scanner’s “enter” button in an effort to slow it down. That, in turn, caused a short circuit that cut off the power, a company spokeswoman said.

“We haven’t been briefed yet. The CIA will be speaking to me today,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before leaving to survey damage from wildfires in California.

But the president has already been shown evidence of the prince’s alleged involvement in the killing, and privately he remains skeptical, Trump aides said. He has also looked for ways to avoid pinning the blame on Mohammed, the aides said.

The president’s most recent comments put him at odds with the findings of the CIA and senior intelligence officials.

When the vote-counting is finished, the GOP may not even have enough lawmakers in California’s 53-member House delegation to field a nine-person softball team.

“It’s dead,” Mike Madrid, a former political director of the California Republican Party, said of the state GOP. “It exists in small regional pockets, where there are enough white, non-college-educated working-class communities for there to be a Republican Party. But that’s not much.”

Other states tilt lopsidedly in favor of one party or the other. But never before has a state with California’s huge populous and enormous import — socially, culturally, economically — been so dominated by a single political party. The implications will take years to fully comprehend.

And in urban areas and Western states, minorities make up the majority of their generation, according to Pew

Don’t miss the major political implications of this [Pew study]: 48% of Post-Millennials (now aged 6 to 21) are members of racial or ethnic minorities–far above the 39% in the Millennial generation (which itself was the prior record-holder). They are just starting to join the electorate..

A new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data finds that the “post-Millennial” generation is already the most racially and ethnically diverse generation, as a bare majority of 6- to 21-year-olds (52%) are non-Hispanic whites. And while most are still pursuing their K-12 education, the oldest post-Millennials are enrolling in college at a significantly higher rate than Millennials were at a comparable age.

The parents of post-Millennials are more well educated than the parents of Millennials and those of previous generations, and this pattern most likely contributes to the relative affluence of the households in which post-Millennials live. … The high school dropout rate for the oldest post-Millennials (ages 18 to 20 in 2017) is significantly lower than that of similarly aged Millennials in 2002. And among those who were no longer in high school in 2017, 59% were enrolled in college – higher than the enrollment rate for 18- to 20-year-old Millennials in 2002 (53%) and Gen Xers in 1986 (44%).

The changing patterns in educational attainment are driven in part by the shifting origins of young Hispanics. Post-Millennial Hispanics are less likely than Millennial Hispanics to be immigrants – 12% of post-Millennial Hispanics were born outside the U.S., compared with 24% of Millennial Hispanics in 2002. Previous research has shown that second-generation Hispanic youth tend to go further in school than foreign-born Hispanic youth. That is borne out in this analysis, as 61% of second-generation Hispanics ages 18 to 20 who were no longer in high school were enrolled in college in 2017, compared with 40% of their foreign-born counterparts.

In a region whose weather is usually pretty temperate, smoke days have become the Bay Area’s version of snow days. But instead of a joyful respite from work, wildfire smoke mixes a blizzard’s large-scale logistical nightmares with the anxiety of worsening climate change and a class divide that plagues American public health. Three of the five largest fires on record in California have occurred in the past three years, all in the northern part of the state. For the region’s residents, smoke days won’t go away once the Camp Fire is contained.

The risk posed by wildfire smoke is significant, and it goes far beyond a few days of coughing or headaches. According to Kristie Ebie, a professor of global public health at the University of Washington, the consequences of breathing wildfire smoke extend to other parts of the body because of the noxious nature of the tiny debris the smoke carries with it. “That affects not only people’s lungs, but it gets absorbed into people’s systems,” she says. Recent research shows that absorption can lead to cardiac arrest, stroke, and other deadly outcomes.

With kids home from school, people working from home, and few safe ways to leave the house, Northern Californians are looking for any outlet available to find some relief.

Photo: Rescue workers search an area where they discovered suspected human remians in a home destroyed by the Camp Fire on November 16, 2018 in Paradise, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

11/17/2018

As many as 7,000 households have been displaced by the Camp fire in Butte County , California

Photo: People drop off freshly baked cookies and cupcakes to Camp Fire evacuees who are living in a Walmart parking on November 16, 2018 in Chico, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

11/17/2018

Camp fire missing persons list now over 1,000, confirmed death toll up to 71

Searchers combing through the ruins of the deadliest wildfire in California history found eight more bodies Friday, bringing the number of dead in the Camp Fire to 71 as more than 1,000 people remained unaccounted for.

Seven of the eight bodies were found in the town of Paradise, which was all but destroyed in the fire that broke out Nov. 8, and the other was in Magalia, north of Paradise, said Butte County Sheriff-Coroner Kory L. Honea said. All were found inside structures.

Honea cautioned that the number of unaccounted for — 1,011 as of Friday night — could include names that are duplicates or have different spelling variations, and that investigators were working to verify them. …

The Camp Fire has displaced thousands of people and led to the evacuation of some 52,000 at the fire’s peak. About 47,200 remained evacuated Friday, officials said. The fire has burned 146,000 acres and was 50 percent contained Friday. … [It] has destroyed at least 9,700 single-family residences, 144 multi-family residences and 336 commercial buildings, according to Cal Fire.

President Donald Trump will meet with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi — who is on his short list be his next attorney general — while he vacations at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach for Thanksgiving next week, according to a source close to the president.

Bondi, Florida’s first female attorney general, is finishing her second term. She is not legally allowed to run again, and has been mentioned as a possible administration appointee since Trump became president last year.

One of the plaintiffs, Kristina Rapuano, alleges that professor Paul Whalen in March 2014 forced himself upon her and put his hands down her pants when she visited his office. About a year later, she attended a conference with Kelley and alleges that he got her drunk and raped her. The lawsuit does not say whether she went to the police.

After the assault, she alleges professor William Kelley kept pressing her for sexual favors. When Rapuano finally rebuffed him, she said Kelley became hostile, stopped providing her with academic guidance and attempted to undermine her research by sharing it with colleagues.

The end also appears near for Senator Bill Nelson’s recount hopes in Florida

Behind Gov. Rick Scott by an unofficial 12,603 Nelson needed to snare a majority of the thousands of undervotes and overvotes spit out by vote tabulating machines during an automatic machine recount that ended Thursday. In particular, he needed to do well in heavily Democratic Broward County, where 30,447 ballots were deemed to be “undervotes” left uncounted by machines because voters failed to follow directions or simply didn’t vote.

Nelson’s campaign hoped the large number of undervotes was machine-related. But there was so little work to do Friday in Broward’s Lauderhill elections headquarters that teams of volunteers were done in less than two hours and stopped working before the lunch catering arrived.

The case against a Neo-Nazi publisher can proceed to trial on accusations he called for a “troll storm” against a Jewish woman, a federal judge ruled.

Claims by Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin that the First Amendment protected his speech were not enough to dismiss the case at this point, the judge said.

The troll storm began after a dispute between Gersh and fellow Whitefish resident Sherry Spencer. Spencer is the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer. Gersh became a target for hate after contacting tenants of a building owned by Sherry Spencer, warning them about possible protests over Richard Spencer’s views.

Maria Butina, an alleged Russian agent who cozied up to the NRA, might seek a plea deal

A gun-rights activist accused of being a Russian agent is negotiating a “potential resolution” to her criminal case, federal prosecutors and her lawyers said Friday.

Butina was arrested over the summer and later indicted on charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent.

Prosecutors say she used her status as a student as a cover to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and other American political organizations associated with the Republican Party during the 2016 campaign and after President Donald Trump’s election.

Meadows was found to have violated House rules “by failing to take appropriate steps to ensure that his House office was free from discrimination and any perception of discrimination.” This case grew out of an investigation into Meadows’ former chief of staff, Kenny West. Meadows kept West on his payroll even after learning of credible harassment allegations against the former aide.

Kihuen, who announced his retirement as the #MeToo movement swept Capitol Hill last year, was found to have “made persistent and unwanted advances towards women who were required to interact with him as part of their professional responsibilities.”

Both lawmakers were reproved by the bipartisan Ethics Committee, the least serious form of punishment it can mete out.

With the air quality index at 316, spending the day outside in Sacramento is like smoking over half a pack of cigarettes.

11/16/2018

Stacey Abrams ends bid to become Georgia’s governor

“I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election, but to watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in this state baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote has been truly appalling.”

Week one of the El Chapo trial included testimony on six-figure bribes and the murder of a Roman Catholic Cardinal

Jesús Zambada, whose brother was once considered one of the cartel’s leaders, said during his second day on the witness stand in Brooklyn that Guzmán once directed him to give $100,000, along with a hug, to a general in the state of Guerrero.

Zambada – a 57-year-old trained accountant who was arrested in 2008 and is still in US custody – was the first of several cooperators expected to give jurors an inside look at a cartel with a legendary lust for drugs, cash and violence.

Two groups that are focused on gun control, Giffords and Everytown for Gun Safety, spent at least $37 million at the state and federal level in the midterms, compared with at least $20 million by the N.R.A. The figures are incomplete, because some of the spending done by such groups is not required to be disclosed, but all sides agreed that the N.R.A. was outspent, stemming a trend of financial dominance for the N.R.A. going back years.

A veteran on Capitol Hill, Andrew Wheeler worked from 1995 to 2009 as a staffer for Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a fervent denier of man-made climate change, and then for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Wheeler later worked as a lobbyist, including for coal giant Murray Energy Corp., which pushed hard at the outset of the Trump administration for coal-friendly policies from the EPA and other agencies.

The grandson of a coal miner, Wheeler told staffers in his first days as the agency’s acting head this summer that he was proud of his roots in coal country. In the acting role, Wheeler has a reputation as a more open and cordial boss for employees than Scott Pruitt was, and a more methodical steward of Mr. Trump’s deregulatory mission.

Photo: A man holds a poster showing a picture of Jamal Khashoggi after taking part in an absence prayer held after Friday pray at Fatih Mosque on November 16, 2018 in Istanbul Turkey. Khashoggi was killed on October 2, 2018 after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to finalize papers for his marriage, sparking a weeks long investigation and creating diplomatic tension between, Turkey, the U.S and Saudi Arabia. His body is still yet to be recovered. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

A poignant cautionary tale about the internet and the perils of popularity

In my office, I have a coffee mug from Stanich’s in Portland, Oregon. Under the restaurant name, it says “Great hamburgers since 1949.” The mug was given to me by Steve Stanich on the day I told him that, after eating 330 burgers during a 30-city search, I was naming Stanich’s cheeseburger the best burger in America. That same day, we filmed a short video to announce my pick. On camera, Stanich cried as he talked about how proud his parents would be. After the shoot, he handed me the mug, visibly moved. “My parents are thanking you from the grave,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. When I left, I felt light and happy. I’d done a good thing.

Five months later, in a story in The Oregonian, restaurant critic Michael Russell detailed how Stanich’s had been forced to shut down. In the article, Steve Stanich called my burger award a curse, “the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.” He told a story about the country music singer Tim McGraw showing up one day, and not being able to serve him because there was a five hour wait for a burger. On January 2, 2018, Stanich shut down the restaurant for what he called a “two week deep cleaning.” Ten months later, Stanich’s is still closed. Now when I look at the Stanich’s mug in my office, I no longer feel light and happy. I feel like I’ve done a bad thing.

a group of about 20 democrats is threatening to withhold support for nancy pelosi in her bid for house speaker, a position she held last time the party was in power. some are freshman who campaigned with the explicit promise that they wouldn’t support heri; others are congressional veterans who appear to want more centrist leadership. is there any good reason to oust pelosi, who is widely regarded as one of the most effective speakers of the modern era?

I may have tipped my hand on my own views with the wording of that question…

Jonathan Chait2:06 PM

She does have high negatives based on years of attacks, and those can be used against Democrats in House elections

Jonathan Chait2:07 PM

I’d say those attacks work almost entirely because pelosi is female (and secondarily from San Francisco). So there would be some benefit to replacing her with a fresh, non-attacked face, especially a white male one (for Democrats in red districts).

But they’ll just attack the new person regardless, and the next speaker’s negatives will approach Pelosi levels pretty quickly, I expect.

the anti-Pelosi argument calls for swapping out your caucus leader every few years just to force the opponent to start from scratch personally demonizing a new name. I don’t think it’s a very good strategy over all.